Tag: myweekinbooks

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was a freebie on the theme of Hallowe’en. My take was A Warning to the Curious: Ghost Stories by M. R. James.   

Wednesday – As always WWW Wednesday is a weekly opportunity to share what I’ve just read, what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next… and to take a peek at what others are reading. 

Friday – I published my review of Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd.

Saturday – I took part in the #6Degrees of Separation meme forging a book chain from Intermezzo by Sally Rooney to Killing Thatcher by Rory Carroll.

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New arrivals

A book club pick and a NetGalley ARC

How to Solve Your Own Murder by Kristen Perrin (audiobook)

Frances Adams always said she’d be murdered. She was right.

It’s 1965 and teenage Frances Adams is at an English country fair with her two best friends. But Frances’s life takes a hairpin turn when a fortune-teller makes a bone-chilling prediction: One day, Frances will be murdered. Frances spends a lifetime trying to solve a crime that hasn’t happened yet, compiling dirt on every person who crosses her path in an effort to prevent her own demise. For decades, no one takes Frances seriously. Until that is, nearly sixty years later, when Frances is found murdered.

In the present day, Annie Adams has been summoned to a meeting at the sprawling country estate of her wealthy and reclusive great aunt Frances. But by the time Annie arrives in the quaint English village of Castle Knoll, Frances is already dead. Annie is determined to catch the killer, but thanks to Frances’s lifelong habit of digging up secrets, it seems every endearing and eccentric villager might just have a motive for her murder.

Can Annie safely unravel the dark mystery at the heart of Castle Knoll, or will dredging up the past throw her into the path of a killer? As Annie gets closer to the truth, and closer to the danger, she starts to fear she might inherit her great aunt’s fate instead of her fortune.

The Bookseller (DS Cross #7) by Tim Sullivan (eARC, Head of Zeus via NetGalley)

Someone’s about to turn their last page…

THE SETTING – When the body of a bookseller is discovered, collapsed in a pool of blood in his Bristolian bookshop, it is immediately clear that he has been murdered. What is unclear is how someone could have met such a violent end in this quiet, peaceful place.

THE CONFLICT – DS Cross is adept at dismissing red-herrings but a worrying development in his personal life has left him hopelessly distracted, leaving his usual means of deciphering evidence challenged.

THE MURDER PLOT – The world of bookselling is a quiet one, but it is full of passionate and ambitious characters. They know a rare book equals a big payoff – and their extensive reading means they also know the best ways to get away with murder…

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On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

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Planned posts

• Blog Tour/Book Review: Revenge of Rome (Eagles of the Empire #23) by Simon Scarrow
• Book Review: Killing Thatcher by Rory Carroll
• Book Review: The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller
• My Five Favourite October 2024 Reads

On What Cathy Read Next last week

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was How My Reading Habits Have Changed Over Time.

Wednesday – As always WWW Wednesday is a weekly opportunity to share what I’ve just read, what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next… and to take a peek at what others are reading. 

Saturday – I shared my review of The Map of Bones by Kate Mosse. 

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New arrivals

A week of ARCs…

The Enigma Girl by Henry Porter (eARC, Quercus via NetGalley)

Slim Parsons is all but burned.

Her last deep cover job for MI5 ended with a life-and-death struggle on a private jet that caused her to go on the run from both the deadly target and her angry bosses in the Security Service. They say that violence comes too easily to her; that she’s bordering on delinquent and unsuitable for the roll of an MI5 operative.

Yet she is recalled and asked to infiltrate a news website that’s causing alarm in the highest circles. It is staffed by a group descended from wartime codebreakers operating from an unassuming office block near Bletchley Park. Operation Linesman looks like a come down, the curtain on a brilliant career in the shadows. However, she accepts the assignment on condition that the Security Service searches for her missing brother.

Linesman turns out to be anything but simple. Her personal loss, her previous deep cover role, and a threat to MI5 itself from her original target come together in a three-way collision.

And all the while she is watched by someone even deeper in the shadows than she is.

Another Man in the Street by Caryl Phillips (eARC, Bloomsbury via NetGalley) 

In the early Sixties, Victor ‘Lucky’ Johnson arrives in London from St Kitts, with dreams of becoming a journalist. Lucky soon finds work first at an Irish pub in Notting Hill – then as a rent collector for an unscrupulous slum landlord Peter Feldman.

Shadowing Lucky from his early struggles in London to the present day, Caryl Phillips paints a striking portrait of a flawed but vividly alive man grappling with the lifelong disillusionments of exile – and the uniquely complicated identity of the Windrush generation.

Another Man in the Street is an unforgettable story of loss, displacement, belonging, and the triumph of Black resilience – epic in scope and yet profoundly intimate; and a radical and timely portrait of immigrant London.

Revenge of Rome (Eagles of the Empire #23) by Simon Scarrow (ARC, Headline)

AD 61. Britannia is divided. The rebel horde has been defeated. But the leader, Boudica, and her remaining warriors are still at large. With them is the eagle standard of the Ninth Legion, taken in ambush, flaunted as proof that Rome can yet be beaten. The embers of rebellion are still glowing . . .

The toll has been heavy, with countless men lost, and major towns in ruins. The bodies of the dead are strewn across the streets. And for Centurion Macro, there is the scarring knowledge that his mother perished in the attack on Londinium.

As Macro’s heart burns for revenge, he and his comrade-in-arms Prefect Cato are tasked with hunting down the remnants of the enemy army. There can be no peace until the queen is captured or killed. And Roman honour will only be restored when the eagle standard has been recovered.

Deeds of Darkness: Stories by William Burton McCormick (eARC, Level Best Books)

A collection of twenty-four globetrotting stories of suspense, mystery, crime, espionage, horror, and historical genres, Deeds of Darkness takes readers from war-torn Eastern Europe to gangster America and deep below the frozen seas of the Arctic Ocean.

From modern tales of crime to World War II espionage to ghost stories in shadowy Odessa and murder in Ancient Rome, every flavour of suspense and adventure awaits within.

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On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

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Planned posts

• Book Review: Gabriel’s Moon by William Boyd
• Book Review: The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller
• My Five Favourite October 2024 Reads
• #6Degrees of Separation